A meeting between a Pope and a British monarch is still pretty revolutionary

In these days of rampant atheism, combined with the chumminess of the international diplomatic merry-go-round, it's easy to forget quite how rare meetings between Popes and British monarchs have been.

The Queen's 1980 trip to Rome was the first ever state visit to the Vatican by a British monarch. Pope John Paul II's visit here in 1982 was the first time a Pope had set foot on British soil for almost half a millennium, since the Reformation. That 1982 trip was classed as a pastoral visit, meaning that Pope Benedict XVI's arrival today marks the first state visit by a Pope since Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.

That split did more to shape Britain than any moment since the Conquest. Together with the English Channel, it divided us from largely Catholic continental Europe, and has done ever since. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that our staying out of the euro stems in part from the Reformation.

Certainly the look of the country is dictated by the split between monarch and Pope. Before the Reformation, churches and cathedrals were the big building projects in Britain. For half a millennium, the church had been more significant than the King and his barons; and church architecture was more significant than secular architecture, royal or noble. 99 per cent of surviving pre-Reformation buildings are churches, cathedrals or monasteries; 0.9 per cent are castles; and domestic buildings account for the other 0.1 per cent.

After the Reformation, royal palaces and houses belonging to the court dominated Britain. The great secular palaces of Britain – Longleat, Hatfield, Chatsworth – and many of the huge landed estates were products of the Reformation.

The slightly shabby, low-key nature of English style was another product. With the Church of England removed from Rome, English style moved away from the grand Roman manner, in particular the Baroque. Hogarth said of the Baroque style in religious art, "Religion, the great promoter of this stile in other countries, in this rejected it."

Us cool, unadventurous northern types rarely got the hang of baroque or rococo architecture in the 17th and 18th centuries, while down in the Catholic south, continental Europeans went mad for the seething, curly-wurly, tempestuous styles of high church architecture. Pope Benedict may well find his billets over here a little sober after the Vatican.

The Civil War, the gradual reform of Parliament, British bloody-mindedness, our fear of abroad, our difficulty with foreign languages, our unsophisticated palates, our taste for beer over wine, for drunkenness over moderate drinking with food… All these things might have existed without the Reformation – and some pre-dated it – but they were all entrenched by the great split.

The easy, happy coming together of Pope and monarch today, shows how that split has narrowed in recent years. But the rarity of such meetings, until recently, shows how extreme the effects of the split were.